Host Your Own Pirate Bay

That’s what the future could hold now that The Pirate Bay is cutting the dead weight of .torrent files and moving toward full reliance on a magnet URI scheme. This effectively turns the pirate site into a searchable index of hash tags without any file hosting or handling.

A user recently ripped the entire magnet index from TPB to a 90 MB list (compressed). According to TorrentFreak, the TPB crew was inspired to say that they may release an official portable version of the site. Then again, they “may” do a lot of things. In the meantime, it is nice to know that there are those of us out there with scripts at the ready to rip a solid list of magnet links and file info.

This is a great step in the direction of P2P decentralization, but it does leave a few problems to be addressed. For example, any official site mirrors would have to be able to communicate with each other in order to update new and removed content in real time. Then there is the issue of spoof sites popping up with misleading magnet links that saythey lead to a Justin Bieber movie but actually lead to virus laden gay porn. Same thing? Ok bad example, but you get the point.

This is why simply releasing a list of magnet links doesn’t replace the convenience of a site like The Pirate Bay. Uploaders need to be able to add content, moderators need to be able to delete content and, perhaps the most important part of this peer to peer protocol, people need to find content.

While Tribler is steadily taking off, the “user majority rules” method it uses is a contrast to the minority moderated strategy used by TPB which has a very small crew dedicated to removing fakes and viruses. It may come down to a matter of user preference or it may take time to see how well the user mod method of Tribler works before we can see which is a more reliable method.

In the meantime, you have likely come across torrent indexes where plenty of unwitting downloaders were now seeding a file that was clearly fake or malicious, only to finally have it removed from the index by a single moderator. Remember, these links can only be unlisted, they can’t be removed from your torrent client. So if you don’t really know what you are doing, and face it, most of you don’t, you might be best off sticking with a moderated index. That said, I think moderators and sites like TPB will remain as valuable members for the bittorrent community.